9 February 2012

The CoSMo Company announced, on 12th December 2011, that they joined the BioPreDyn European project bringing their software modeling platform for biotechnology.

The BioPreDyn project

Eight Europeans academic laboratories and three industrial partners join forces in the "BioPreDyn project" to develop new computational tools and methods based on a very innovativesoftware platform to integrate within models the massive amount of data arising in biotechnology.

The final goal of this three-year project funded within the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission is to improve biotechnological processes leading to in-silico simulations.

The kick-off meeting for BioPreDyn has been held on the 12th and 13th December 2012 at the CRG in Barcelona, the project coordinator site.

Integrating and making sense of the biological data

Biological systems involve an incredibly large diversity of molecules, reactions and interactions. 21st Century technology allows us - for the first time - to measure and obtain biological data on large scale at many different scales and levels: from molecules to whole organisms, and from tiny bacteria to humans.

However, these massive data sets are often incomplete, and of very diverse nature. Our brain is not able to deal with such complexity on its own, and the challenge ahead is to integrate and make sense of the data in order to understand and predict biological processes and their applications.

Computational modeling and simulation is absolutely essential for this daunting task.

The new modeling tools

On the long term, the new modeling tools will allow the design and optimization of biotechnological production processes in a reliable, predictive and quantitative way.

The CoSMo Company, will bring its unique software platform designed to represent the individual components of a biological system with a multi-scale approach to support modeling process in its entirety.

Additionally, The CoSMo Company will enable a widespread application of this approach, both in the context of the academic research community and the private sector.

The other two participating companies will immediately benefit from the platform and the synergies with the academic modelers:

Fluxome will improve their production processes for dietary supplements, and

Statements

Julio R. Banga, CSIC researcher, in Vigo and one of the scientific coordinators of the project, emphasizes that "BioPreDyn presents a holistic approach to model building in bioinformatics and systems biology, targeting both fundamental theory and real-world applications".

Johannes Jaeger, a coordinator of the Project from the CGR, in Barcelona, points out that the project is indispensable as it "aims at creating an integrated suite of robust and solid methods to empower data-driven modelling for the systems biology and biotechnology of the future, shortening the lag time 'from ideas to the market'".

Dr. Eric Boix, the CSO of the CoSMo Company, said "We are really thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with BioPreDyn partners and to provide, with our software platform, the means for succeeding the challenging model coupling phase at different levels of a living organism. Several public private research partnerships have been or are addressing ambitious biological problems using the CoSMo Company software solution for modeling of morphogenesis, HIVepidemiology and immunoregulation. This project is exciting as it leads us to real-world applications".

Hugues de Bantel, CEO of The CoSMo Company said "There is a pressing need to make sense of the growing amount of data available to biologists to understand and manipulate complex biological systems. "In silico" modeling and simulation in biotechnology is a very exciting challenge for us, not only by its scale but also by the possible outcomes and positive impact on global healthcare".

Find out more

The CoSMo Company, based in Lyon (France), specializes in developing the next generation simulation software to understand, predict and study complex systems.

The Company works with academic institutes on problems in a variety of domains ranging from biology, urban planning, and sustainability.

Its partners seek to control the complexity of their field through dynamic scenarios to predict their future behavior and make better decisions.